A femtocell is a low power Base Station (BS) which is typically intended for home or Small Office Home Office (SOHO) usage unlike the typical macro BS. The SOHO is a high power base station commonly used in the wireless cellular systems. Moreover, a femtocell can be deployed as Closed Subscriber Groups (CSG) BS in which only a pre-subscribed and/or a configured Mobile Stations (MSs) are allowed. Femtocells can also be configured to be Open Subscriber Group (OSG) femtocells which allow all subscribers to access the femtocell for communication.
In a geographic location, there can be dense deployment of femtocells to support wireless communication. However, such deployment can inevitably cause the femtocells to interfere with each other. For instance a macro cell user which is near to a femtocell can experience interference from the femtocell. Similarly, a femtocell user may experience interference from the macro cell in Downlink (DL). Likewise, a femtocell BS can experience interference from a nearby macro cell user in Uplink (UL). On similar lines a femtocell can cause interference to operation of nearby femtocells.
In such a scenario, a Self Organizing Network (SON) can be used to automatically mitigate the interference. On the other hand in CSG femtocells, there can be a scenario where there are no users under it for a significant portion of the time. For example, during a daytime the users are in office, hence a femtocell BS in their home is causing interference to nearby femtocell/macro cell users besides wasting power in broadcasting its system information and causing interference to nearby femtocell/macro cell users. This interference scenario is much more apparent in a situation when the femtocell and the macro cell are deployed in the same frequency allocation (FA).
In order to reduce the interference from the femtocells and to save on the operating power of the femtocell, there exist a method which proposes to switch the femtocell into a Low Duty Operation (LDO) mode in which the femtocell switches into a period of activity and inactivity. Thus during the active period the femtocell broadcasts its preamble while during the inactive period the femtocell shuts its preamble transmission as well. The femtocell will be in Low Duty Cycle (LDC) mode until an MS comes under the femtocell and the femtocell is intimidated about it. However, the important issues of how to help an MS efficiently scan and search femtocells in LDC mode do not exist.
Hence, there exists a need for a method that provides efficient working of the LDC Mode operation of the femtocell.